Overview
The purpose of this report is to take a look at one of the
least understood of all American minorities, the deaf. While it
has been only recently that some among the deaf have come to consider
themselves a minority, they would identify themselves as such
not because of their ghandicap.h Instead, they would likely tell
you that they belong to a linguistic minority, and the language
to which they would refer would undoubtedly be ASL, American Sign
Language.
ASL is not English. It is a language with its own grammar
and vocabulary, and was created over generations largely by the
deaf themselves. ASL (I will use the word gSignsh as gASLh has
come into widespread use only recently), as have signed languages
everywhere, has had an uneven history. It has only been within
the past four centuries that (in Europe in any case) it has been
used as a formal learning mechanism for language acquisition.
It was not until the 19th century that it began to emerge as a
full-fledged language. Moreover, it has only been within the past
few decades that it has gained general acceptance as a legitimate
language, able to take its place among the spoken languages of
the world.
The signed languages which have sprung out of deaf communities
throughout the world have also had to compete for legitimacy with
other means of communication imposed upon them by the hearing
world. The most prevalent alternative has been oralism, the various
methods by which the deaf have been taught to voice sounds they
cannot hear and learn to read the lips of the persons with whom
they are talking. This of course involved not only the arduous
task of learning to make the sounds but also of mastering the
alien language from which the sounds emanated.
This struggle against oralism was made even more difficult
in that it had to be waged against the very people, most of them
hearing, who were the benefactors of the deaf. They were also
faced with the challenge of countering the notion of deafness
as a pathological condition, a ghandicap,h a gdisability,h as
opposed to deafness as a social condition which could be best
met with education.

Separation and Conformity
I grew up in what one would probably call a typical upper-midwestern
American city. In the 1950s, black residents, many of them first
or second-generation immigrants from the South, were confined
to two areas in the downtown area. At the center of these two
areas were two schools, ironically named Lincoln and Roosevelt.
There were no black residents in the newly developed subdivision
in which we lived. Even a car passing through with black passengers
would draw comment from the neighbors. It was not until junior
high school that I encountered black students on a routine basis,
and this was largely by chance, as my junior high included within
its boundaries the predominantly black Roosevelt Elementary. Of
the six other junior highs, Lincoln was almost exclusively black,
while four of the others were almost exclusively white. Of the
two
public high schools in town, one was white; the other was about
20 percent black. This geographical segregation was the norm in
most northern cities of that time.
In larger northern cities this ghettoization was even more
complete. It was not until the civil rights movement bore fruit
in the early 1970s that this system of residential segregation
in the north began to break down, while mandated busing led to
integration of school systems.
I also remember that a number of white families had moved
into our neighborhood from somewhere in the South. The children
spoke southern English, but after relentless taunting, quickly
learned to speak northern English. However, they were always reluctant
to take friends to their homes because their parents still spoke
southern English that obviously shamed them.
The gmelting poth we learned about in school was therefore
a highly restrictive one. It was for whites, and had a decidedly
northern WASPish bias. I addition to the visible though separate
black presence were a number of hidden minorities. The small Jewish
community was unobtrusive. The synagogue itself was hidden behind
a grove of trees. I never knew that a small number of my classmates
in high school were Jewish until after they graduated, left town,
and grediscoveredh their Jewishness. There was also a sizable
Latvian community, who aside from their church and Saturday Latvian
schools were almost invisible. There were other hidden minorities,
neither racial nor religious. The 1950s and early 1960s was still
a time when persons with ghandicaps,h be they mental or physical,
were still institutionalized or otherwise separated from everyday
society. It was within this group, the ghandicappedh (later the
more politically correct gdisabledh), into which the deaf fell,
and they too faced the same isolation and the same pressures to
conform.
The United States had of course recently endured a long depression
and just exited World War II. The Korean War had ended in 1953,
but it served as a poignant reminder to most of the population
of a Cold War that threatened nuclear destruction or totalitarian
communist rule. In any case these external factors helped foster
a sense of national unity, and the economic boom of the
1950s fueled a sense of optimism and a myth of national integration,
stability and common purpose.
On the other hand, this outward calm masked deep fissures
in American society. These were exposed first during the civil
rights movement, when there were calls for equal access to the
rights and privileges often denied to minorities and others without
access to power or representation. Next came the social explosions
which came in the wake of the civil rights movement, fueled by
the Vietnam War campus revolts, where demands for integration
turned to demands for autonomy.

My first exposure to the deaf came not from personal experience
but from a 1986 article in the New York Review of Books by the
neurologist Oliver Sacks (reprinted and revised in Seeing Eyes).
In this article he discussed the deaf experience |what it must
be like to be deaf and the historical struggle waged by the deaf
sought to gain legitimacy for their language and recognition as
an autonomous minority. I was moved by the story of this invisible
and silent minority, and began collecting books written about
and by the deaf. In my English classes I often used the movie
gChildren of a Lesser Godh and the made for television movie gLove
is never Silent,h based on the book In This Sign by Joanne Greenberg.
Over the course of the two-year Hirosaki University Research/Education
project in which I have been a participant, we drew compared the
world's nationalisms and the different constructions of national
identities |languages, histories, cultures, myths. I decided to
back to the materials I had gathered on the deaf and have reexamined
how their experience was influenced by the American nationalism
and the attempt to construct a national identity.

The Rise of Sign
Until recent times becoming deaf was a horrible fate. Being
born deaf was catastrophic. In Europe, the deaf were without rights,
but more significantly without language. This was especially true
for those prelingually deaf, who were most often consigned to
a state of permanent semi-retardation and isolation. For, what
characterizes the vast majority of the deaf is that they are rarely
born to the deaf, which means they cannot bond lingually with
their mothers.
There were, however, examples of deaf children born into wealthy
households, particularly in 17th century Spain where tutors were
brought in to try to help children learn to fingerspell, or in
some cases to actually write and speak. Gradually, word of such
random efforts spread to other parts of Europe. (Van Cleve &
Crouch, 11)
Sign got its institutional start in Paris in the mid-17th century,
when a priest noticed the signs being used by bands of the deaf
who roamed the streets of the city. He managed to lure some of
them to a state-supported school he started. He and others developed
a method of teaching by which they combined the sign language
of the streets with signed French grammar, enabling many of their
deaf pupils to learn to read and write French. (Sacks, 17). It
was this school, the National (Paris) Institution for Deaf-Mutes,
which became a model for other institutions for the deaf.

Laurent Clerc was born deaf. He was educated at the Paris
Institute and was one of their great successes. When in London,
he met Thomas Gallaudet, an evangelical minister and educator
of the deaf from the United States, who was visiting Europe in
search of better ways to teach the deaf to communicate. He convinced
Clerc to accompany him back across the Atlantic.
Sacks notes that Clerc ghad an immediate and extraordinary
impacth in the United States, gfor American teachers up to this
point had never been exposed to, never even imagined, a deaf-mute
if impressive intelligence and education, had never imagined the
possibilities dormant in the deaf.h (Sacks, 21) Clerc and Gallaudet
founded a school for the deaf in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817.
Although several other schools had been established in the United
States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, this school,
the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf
and Dumb Persons (later changed to the American School for the
Deaf), was the first permanent school for the deaf.
Since the school drew from a wide area, most enrollees could
not possibly commute from their homes. The school therefore became
a residential institution. This had important ramifications, for
although taking children from their families at a very early age
it also gave them the opportunity to acquire language when they
were very young children, the critical time for becoming lingual.
These residential schools also provided the critical mass that
made it possible for a gstandardh Sign to emerge, and gave the
residents a sense of belonging to a wider deaf community.
The American School consciously eschewed oralism for various
forms of sign. In addition to written English, a form of sign
akin to what would later become signed English, and fingerspelling,
special prominence was given to the sign language which had been
developed by the deaf themselves. (Van Cleve & Crouch, 44)
The sign which developed in these institutions, the sign which
eventually evolved into ASL was undoubtedly an eclectic blend
of the various gdialectsh brought to Hartford by Clerc himself,
other teachers, as well as the students themselves.

The story of one group of students, and the dialect that
contributed most to the birth of ASL, came from a unique bilingual
community in Massachusetts. Nora Ellen Groce in her book, Everyone
Here Spoke Sign Language, found that immigrants who came in the
17th century from western Kent in England to Martha's Vineyard,
an island off the coast of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, the recessive
gene for deafness. Because of the relative isolation and stability
of the population of the island, this gene manifested and flourished,
and a large percentage of the population of this predominantly
fishing community was born deaf. This forced the hearing to become
bilingual. Indeed, most of the hearing residents learned sign
as children.
The deaf in Matha's Vineyard grew up as functioning and integrated
members of their community. When the island's deaf children were
sent away to the American School after its founding in 1817, they
took with them this sense of normalcy, as well as their language
which because of their numbers and its richness became a key ingredient
in the mix which eventually
became ASL.
According to those who have written about the history of Sign,
the 50 or 60 years which followed the founding of the American
School were a golden age for Sign and for the deaf. The American
School thrived, as did other schools that used Sign. Increasing
numbers of deaf teachers were being trained and general education
levels rose. Van Cleve and Crouch have also pointed to this as
a very active period for other deaf organizations, gof rather
than for deaf people.h They found that gin the United States deaf
people created their own associations, funded them, and controlled
them. In this respect the American deaf experience contrasted
dramatically with the experience of deaf people in other nations,
where historically most organizations were established for deaf
people by hearing people. The paternalism of foreign deaf organizations
often meant that, however well-meaning their administrators, their
primary focus was on the expectations and needs of hearing people.h
(Van Cleve & Crouch, 87) The deaf had newspapers, tended to
intermarry, and held an array of conventions. (Baynton, 26)

The Fall of Sign
In the 1880s, the tide began to turn against Sign. As Sacks
puts it, gIn the 1870s, a current that had been growing for decades,
fed, paradoxically by the immense success of the deaf-mute asylums
and their spectacular demonstration of the educability of the
deaf, erupted and attempted to eliminate the very instrument of
success.h (Sacks, 25)
The gcurrenth to which Sacks referred was the need perceived
by some educators to force the deaf outside the deaf community
and to integrate with society as a whole. This, it was increasingly
felt, could only be accomplished by having the deaf learn to speak
and to lip read. This approach, oralism, had always had a number
of outspoken advocates. These greformersh maintained that sign
language asylums were out of date and that gprogressiveh oralist
schools must become the norm. (Sacks, 26)
The most influential advocate of this position was Alexander
Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, who felt that the deaf
should not be allowed to disappear into the confines of their
own isolated world. He also was a strong believer in eugenics
and feared that the deaf living apart would form ga deaf variety
of the human race,h and perpetuate other negative genetic traits
as well. (Baynton, 6 & 30) Both Bell's mother and wife were
deaf, but this was never acknowledged in public. His grandfather
and father were both well-known for their work in correcting speech
impediments and Bell was working to perfect and popularize a method
of teaching speech to the deaf created by his father, called gVisible
Speech.h (Baynton, 103)
Oralism had a long history. In Europe, the prevalent method
in Germany was by and large oral. The gFrench methodh was the
method developed by the Paris Institution for the Deaf. Institutions
in other European countries followed one method or the other.
In the United States, one could see the same mix, although the
French method was more established because of the influence of
Clerk, the Gallaudets and the American School. (Van Cleve &
Crouch, 107)
However, the tide began to turn in Europe in the late 1870s
when French oralists convinced the French government that sign
language had no grammar and that it obstructed the learning of
French. The minister of the interior then ordered government-backed
schools for the deaf to use oral French. The head of the Paris
Institution, who backed the use of sign language, was fired. His
replacement was an gotologist, a medical doctor, who had no sympathy
for or understanding of signs.h (Van Cleve & Crouch, 108)
With the majority of European institutions firmly in the oralist
camp, oralists gradually began to take control of the education
of the deaf. 1880 proved to be a turning point. The International
Congress for the Improvement of Deaf Mutes was held that year
in Milan. The deaf were largely been excluded. Of the 164 delegates,
163 were hearing. Only 5 Americans plus one European delegate
voted against a resolution which maintained the superiority of
speech (oralism) over the use of signs.
Greatly encouraged and strengthened by this victory, Bell
and other oralists move to establish organizations which could
compete with and supplant the Convention of American Instructors
of the Deaf which was dominated by Edward Miner Gallaudet, the
son of the founder of the American School, and other advocates
of sign. Their efforts began to bear fruit. In 1882, only 7.5%
of the 7000 pupils in American schools for the deaf were taught
using strictly oral methods. In 1900, this number had reached
47%, then passing the 50% mark in 1905. At oralism's peak in 1919,
it was said that 80% of all deaf students in the United States
did not use their hands when being taught. (Van Cleve & Crouch,
122)
Bell and other oralists lobbied hard for the removal of Sign
and of deaf teachers from the teaching staffs of schools for the
deaf. They also urged an end to residential schools and advocated
the establishment of day schools from which students could commute
from home, thereby preserving the integrity of the family and
keeping the deaf from establishing communal ties. (Baynton, 67)
The numbers reflect their success. In 1850, approximately
half of the teachers in schools for the deaf were deaf themselves.
By 1900 this had dropped to about a quarter and then to around
12% by 1960. Those deaf teachers who remained were often relegated
to industrial courses for those students who had not been able
to learn speech. Unfortunately for the deaf, oralism never worked.
The general literacy level of the deaf dropped considerably. Sacks
cites a 1972 Gallaudet College survey which found the reading
levels of 18-year-old deaf high school students to be at the fourth
grade level. Other studies showed similar results. (Sacks, 27-28)
Although Bell and others challenged and successfully undermined
the legitimacy of ASL, ASL was not completely eradicated from
deaf schools in the United States, nor did it lose its place within
the deaf community. ASL went underground. In addition to the surviving
residential schools, the existence of Gallaudet College (later
University) in Washington D.C., founded in 1864, provided a place
where students could continue to use Sign, even if it had to be
done furtively. As a matter of fact, Gallaudet was the only institution
of higher learning for the deaf in the world for over 100 years,
though women were not routinely admitted until the 1890s.
However, the delegitimization of sign and the attack on residential
institutions served to fragment the deaf community, and it was
not until the 1970s and 1980s that the deaf community was to emerge
with the force it had shown in the mid-1800s. The deaf themselves
were in a weak position within the deaf education gestablishment.h
Deaf teachers were a minority in deaf schools. There were few
deaf principals or superintendents, and few or none on school
governing boards. Yet, because of the diversity and the decentralization
of policy-making in the United States, where authority extended
from the federal government to states and to local bodies such
as school boards, and where private philanthropic bodies were
more involved in funding deaf-related projects, American institutions
serving the deaf were not subjected to the same state directed
pressures found in Europe, where policies and funding were more
highly concentrated. There was therefore some breathing room for
Sign.

Assimilation and National Unity
The victory of oralism over sign was not simply the result
of a power struggle between those involved in the education of
the deaf, but reflected major transformations in post-Civil War
American society. The northern victory had brought on a burst
of regionally based nationalistic euphoria, followed by a move
towards social conservatism. Industrialization and urbanization
were transforming what had been an agrarian society. Populations
of cities doubled, trebled, even quadrupled within decades.
These industrial workers were often the sons of farmers, who
moved from the farm to the factory in what was to be a century-long
migration. It was also fueled by the great migrations from Europe
in the late 19th century. Some Europeans, notably from Germany
and Scandinavia, headed for parts of the country where farmland
was still available, whereas many, notably the Irish and later
the Italians and East European Jews, remained where they arrived,
in the urban centers in the northeast.
To many WASPs these trends threatened the well being of the
nation. In the first place, the Irish and the Italians were Catholic
and their numbers and perceived fecundity as well as their alien
ways were perceived as a potential menace. These aliens were concentrated
in growing urban areas, which were considered to be centers of
corruption and vice in the minds of many evangelical Protestants.
It was in these years after the Civil War that one begins
to see stepped up efforts to promote social legislation which
would greformh these not-yet Americanized arrivals. The growing
prohibition movement was one example of the reformism initiated
by evangelical Protestants to stamp out the sin and otherness
of the new arrivals. The educational reform movement that ultimately
led to the legislation that created universal compulsory education
also grew out of this effort to assimilate and Americanize the
new urban immigrants. That oralism rose to prominence at this
time was probably no coincidence. Residential schools for the
deaf drew similar expressions of hostility, as did the parochial
schools that taught European immigrants in their native languages.
(Baynton, 34)
Another factor, particularly relevant to the sign-oralism
controversy, was the reformist ideas generated by the rising optimism
in technology and science. It was thought that scientific advances
and approaches could lead to the solution of many social ills.
Thus one sees the determined confidence with which Bell and others
tried to engineer the deaf into speakers.
Another factor emerged after the 1859 publication of Charles
Darwin's Origin of Species. Although many American Christians
refused to accept its implications for Biblical interpretation,
they embraced many of the social offshoots. Prior to the Civil
War, educating the deaf was largely the enterprise of evangelical
Protestants whose purpose was minister to the unsaved. For them,
sign was a means to introduce the gospel to the deaf, much as
learning the languages of peoples of Africa or native Americans
made it possible to proselytize and convert them. But after the
Civil War these concerns changed. Evangelicals became more involved
with the social ills, which accompanied immigration, industrialization
and urban squalor.
The social application of Darwinism reinforced the feelings
of racial and cultural superiority held by many Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
Caucasian races were found to be more evolved than non-Caucasian
races. Northern European cultures were found to be more evolved
than those of the south. gLinguistic Darwinismh reflected poorly
on the deaf, for whereas in pre-Darwinian days the lack/loss of
hearing separated them from God, for which exposure to the Gospel
was the remedy, their deafness was now seen as an evolutionary
defect which reflected their genetic and evolutionary inferiority.
Sign, guilty by association, was an inferior ggesticularh language,
a possible indication of subhuman communication, an inferior language
that preceded the earliest and most primitive gsavageh languages.
(Baynton, 40) Therefore, one can understand Bell's desire to hide
his wife and mother and to rely on his technological and scientific
know-how to bring them into the realm of the hearing.
The scales were tipped against sign at many different levels.
Although one does not see the same state-sponsored attempts to
create a national language as in Europe, where minority cultures
and their languages were everywhere under attack, similar results
were achieved at the local level. Educational efforts increasingly
emphasized national myths and identity, and did it by promoting
English-language literacy.

The Sixties and Beyond
Sacks and other commentators credit the civil rights movement
with the awakening of the deaf community and the beginnings of
the revitalization of sign. The empowerment movements of many
ethnic, religious and linguistic groups that followed in the late
1960s |1980s also had a profound impact on the deaf community,
particularly amongst the young. Black civil rights activists who
in the early stages of the civil rights movement demanded integration
and equality adopted strategies of self-respect and self-empowerment
to mobilize constituencies. These often replaced the original
goals of the movement. Many deaf moved in the same direction.
In 1968, the United States Congress passed the Bilingual Education
Act, a piece of the Great Society legislation that signified a
shift in national policy, recognition of the pluralistic nature
of American society. However, the goal of assimilation or integration
remained, the idea being that a young person could best access
the English language as well as American culture through his or
her native. While this legislation had little immediate impact
on the deaf, changes were in the air.

In the late 1950s, William Stokoe was hired to teach medieval
studies at Gallaudet University. He developed a fascination for
the Sign he saw being used by students in their informal dealings
with one another and decided to do a systematic study of it. His
research into Sign led him to publish two studies in the 1960s
that showed Sign (ASL) to be a complex and sophisticated language.
Although repudiated by oralists and advocates of signed English,
it raised the status of Sign, particularly amongst its own speakers.
On other campuses across the United States one saw the emergence
of courses and majors which recognized and validated cultural
diversity: black studies, Hispanic studies, Jewish studies, women's
studies being examples. This had an impact on the deaf community
as well. In 1986, Gallaudet University offered for the first time
a course on the history of the deaf in the United States. However,
even at Gallaudet, Sign (ASL) was still restricted and only signed
English was allowed. (Sacks, 150)
Growing tensions on the Gallaudet campus came to a head in
the spring of 1988, when the president decided to step down. On
the short-list of presidential candidates were three hearing and
three deaf. Gallaudet had never had a deaf president, and students
quickly coalesced and demanded that the board of trustees name
one of the deaf candidates president. However, with the backing
of the board chair, who was firmly in the oralist, signed English
camp, a hearing president was named. The students declared a strike.
In the end the students won. Both the president and the chair
were forced to resign and a new president, who although hearing,
was fluent in Sign, was named.
New approaches to teaching the deaf have also emerged in the
1990s. A total communication approach which combines ASL, speech,
English (written and signed), and fingerspelling has gained in
popularity. On the other hand, a more assertive approach, championed
by author and activist Harlan Lane, has also emerged. Drawing
upon the spirit of the Bilingual Education Act and multi-culturalism,
Lane and others call for a bilingual and bicultural approach to
the education of the deaf, with deaf culture to be grounded in
ASL, reaching out to the greater English-speaking community from
this base of cultural solidarity. A more conservative, assimilationist
approach has also arisen since the 1970s with the popularization
of signed English, a direct though cumbersome rendering of English
using sign.
Just how far the deaf activism had come was made clear in
an article that appeared in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly
magazine. Edward Dolnick looked into a controversy that was dividing
the deaf community in the United States. He first explored how
many deaf have come to reject deafness as a gdisability,h and
have come to see themselves as a subculture, drawing parallels
with ethnicity, a glinguistich minority with ASL as their defining
characteristic.
Part of this controversy was over recent medical and technological
advances that have made it possible in some cases to allow the
deaf to hear. Activists have called this an invasion of their
cultural integrity. Forcing a deaf child to become hearing, they
reasoned, was an assault on the child's and the deaf community's
cultural identity.
Dolnick also noted how this rejection of the gdisabledh label
has also created tensions between the deaf and the gdisabled lobby,h
which dwarfs the deaf community in size, is a major lobby and
funding-raising powerhouse, and is the source of much of the funding
received by deaf organizations.
Another challenge has been posed to activists seeking to maintain
the integrity of the deaf community, a liberal integrationist
reform which also came out of the civil rights movement | mainstreaming.
Mainstreaming programs have taken children with gdisabilitiesh
out of institutions and placed them into the public schools. Even
though less pernicious than oralism, the results have been much
the same. There may be but one deaf child in a class, or in an
entire school, isolated from deaf peers and the deaf community
in general. Activists have sought to turn back these and other
programs that threatened to divide the deaf community. (Baynton,
153)

Afterthoughts
The backlash against multi-culturalism in general and bilingual
education in particular has been building since the 1980s. First
of all, many educators have expressed doubts about the effectiveness
of bilingualism as a learning tool for preparing a child to succeed
in the English-speaking world; arguments not unlike those made
by oralists against Sign in the late 1800s.
Professional skepticism and political resentment lie behind
the English as official language movement. Proponents maintain
that English should be the sole language of government and other
public functions and should be given special legal official status.
Such legislation has passed in over 20 states. In California,
where 40% of all non-English speakers reside, a ballot initiative
passed in 1998 eliminating in the schools most instruction in
non-English languages.
This backlash is in many ways reminiscent of national integration
movements in the late 19th century. Since World War II, large
numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants have moved into southern
border areas of the United States, as well as into many parts
of the north. Immigrants from Southeast Asia, Haiti, Russia and
other parts of the world have also swelled the non-English speaking.
For many social conservatives, this again threatens national identity,
hence the popularity of moves to restrict immigration, attacks
on multi-culturalism in public schools and universities, and movements
similar to the one to establish English as the official language.

Bibliography
Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the
Campaign against Sign Language (University of Chicago, 1996)
@ Dolnick, Edward. gDeafness as Cultureh The Atlantic Monthly,
September 1993, pp 37-53
Groce, Nora Ellen. Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary
Deafness on Martha's Vineyard (Harvard University, 1985)
Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (Random
House, 1984)
Sacks, Oliver. Seeing Voices: A Journey into the World of
the Deaf (HarperCollins, 1990)
Van Cleve, John Vickery and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of their
Own: Creating the Deaf Community (Gallaudet University, 1990)